Richard Gravett is a Senior Gardener at Sissinghurst with responsibility for the Delos garden. We asked him to share his observations of the garden during this challenging gardening summer.  

In the years that I have worked at Sissinghurst I have not seen such a profusion of Autumn germination in Delos. After months of drought, the rain that finally arrived in the last week of August has greened the gravel with a mix of seedlings. Many I recognise and, to my delight, there are cotyledons I am not familiar with. Subsequent summers of garden are being instigated now and I’m extremely careful of where I tread, clear and weed so as not to disturb this potential. After the solstice, I watched Delos make the necessary adaptations to weather the drought. Flowering slowed and went to seed quickly, foliage dropped, curled and shrank to conserve water and some plants disappeared underground altogether. September’s calmer temperatures and wetter ground has brought about lethargic but welcome growth and I’m heartened to see some plants budding up again to flower.

A sense of renewal in the garden now is a relief, but not wholly satisfactory after such a hard and frankly frightening gardening summer. The Lombardy poplar that towers at the boundary of the garden has dropped around half of its leaves over Delos during the season. The tissue paper rustle of their fall put into stark comparison the resilience of this mediterranean garden against the struggle of more familiar and long-standing characters in the landscape. Picking up the poplar’s crisp and yellowed leaves, as I gardened around sturdy greens and silvers, made sure that I didn’t forget or escape the grief I have felt about other parts of Sissinghurst wounded by the drought. Conversely, I have also felt a calm in Delos through those months and found beauty in transient flowering followed by papery silhouettes, fizzing and swaying around evergreen mounds of various shades.